EVERYBODY'S CRAZY

Well I was going to watch a movie before bed, but it's been a 
little while since I last wrote a phlog post, and I've built up a 
little backlog of topics, so I decided to talk to you instead. Yes, 
aren't you lucky? Well no you're not because I still haven't sorted 
out a new place to host this since Aussies.space went read-only, 
and the Gopher server there has been down all this week too. Today 
I did sent an email to Fosslinux just to see whether it's really 
still a work in progress, but I guess the evidence is plain that 
it's not something he's very fussed about. It's less than clear 
whether emails to aussies.space addresses get delivered anyway, I 
certainly can't read any of mine now since SSH and IMAP access got 
cut off [it turns out the the latter actually just moved to
mail.aussies.space at some point].

Also, after Aioe.org died, which didn't really affect me, now I 
have lost some NNTP access because the extremely quiet tilde 
newsgroups have been closed off from outside posting due to some 
trolling. That's fair enough I suppose, but personally I don't 
really mind the crazy troll stuff on Usenet. The only things that I 
killfile are mass-posted spam posts like all the "solutions manual" 
rubbish that flooded in from Google Groups (like pretty much all 
the outright spam) a while ago. Also the really boring idiot 
nutcases like that guy who posts random numbers/dates/nonsense to 
rec.arts.drwho. But, even if it's not what I go there for, I do get 
some good laughs from skimming over the long posts from the 
complete crazys on Usenet. You don't want to read them properly 
most of the time, but just skim over the general insanity. I even 
have some saved, although I opted not to include them in my 
usenet_funnys section here, there's one that has me almost on the 
floor laughing every time. In fact I was chuckling away at the 
label "crypto jews" in the post from "KKK" on the tilde groups 
before I went onto the next post and got the cold news that it had 
decided the issue about public posting access.

Before you judge me too much, I do have a strict non-interaction 
policy with these nutcase trolls. I don't want to encourage them to 
go further down their rabbit hole just for my amusement. But as 
they're there anyway, it's just a fun outing to the asylum. Mind 
you, awareness of the sheer number of 'normal' people who actually 
are that crazy at heart can be quite alarming. It wouldn't surprise 
me if "crypto jews" actually does mean something to some big bunch 
of social media crazies, but I don't what to know about that, it's 
just the ironic obviousness about that stuff in isolation that 
entertains me. Maybe only me.

But then there's a sense that I carry, and I know this just defines 
myself as crazy, but anyway I feel like the internet reveals enough 
about individuals who open themselves up on it that everyone seems 
insane if you study them closely enough. I think the old cliche 
that the more you know people (usually different cultures), you 
find they're all the same at heart, beyond a point it goes in 
reverse. The more you _really_ know the intimate details of 
someone's life, the more you think they're absolutely clinically 
bonkers.

I guess it might be a world view thing, because I'm someone who 
doesn't go with the flow very well. If everyone's walking one way, 
then my preference is to head anywhere else. Any suggested action 
not accompanied by an explicit rational argument is actively 
avoided. It's not a particularly suitable attitude for the purpose 
of making friends, but I do believe it's the only decent way to 
live. The consequence though is that I do tend to label pretty much 
anyone who copies other people's actions or suggestions without 
being presented with a clear rational argument (in my opinion), as 
fundamentally crazy.

Of course I don't really trust crazy people, so it does tend 
to happen that I latch onto one thing that someone does which 
doesn't make rational sense to me, and remember it permanently as a 
reason to never really trust them for the rest of their life. But 
this is really just an emotive way to remind myself that I don't 
really trust anyone, because really they're all crazy.

But now that I've admitted to thinking that everyone is crazy, 
which is the clearest sign that I'm crazy myself, I would just 
point out that in a practical sense 'crazy' and 'unpredictable' are 
basically the same. The idea that everyone is unpredictable is much 
less shocking, and possibly mainstream. The constraints on the 
unpredictability of decision making, ones motivations, are a 
fundamental topic of psychology. People of that field propose 
various conditions where healthy decision making should be entirely 
predictable, yet where exactly conditions are such that valid 
thought is allowed to be unpredictable is unclear. Philosphically 
the question might be whether decision making is fundamentally 
random, skewed by instinct and learning into networks of 
probability outcomes that meerly diminish the chance of major error 
to near zero in the best cases. Or is it a set of fixed 
computer-like patterns, interacting with infinite inputs above a 
basic core stucture in such a complex way that it is chaotic and 
therefore unpredictable in specifics while being completey 
deterministic and following entirely reliable basic patterns.

I believe in the random mind that is never even theoretically 
completely predictable. Or in other words the mind that is 
fundamentally crazy. Except mine of course, because in a truely 
random world the truth can only be whatever you yourself think it 
is.

 - The Free Thinker